COVINGTON, Ky. — During this year's playoffs, I have rediscovered my ability to fall asleep on airplanes. At first, I thought I was sleeping so easily because I was on a few flights from Boston for which I had to wake up at 3 a.m., and on which I was lucky enough to get upgrades to first class, with a complimentary pillow. Then, heading to Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, I zonked out in a middle seat in coach between two guys who staked early claim to the armrests.

I was once again able to fall asleep today on the first leg of my trip back from Chicago to Boston, and when I woke up at Cincinnati's lovely airport, I turned on my phone and learned about Jonathan Bernier getting traded from the Kings to the Maple Leafs. It's a strange thing to try to process news through a sleepy fog, but even after having chowed down on a couple of coneys from Gold Star Chili, I still don't understand what Toronto is doing.

For the Kings, it makes great sense, trading Bernier for Ben Scrivens, Matt Frattin, and a second-round pick. Dean Lombardi traded away his restricted free agent backup goaltender and in return got a backup goaltender with a $612,500 cap hit for next season, plus a useful bottom-six forward, plus a top-60 draft pick.

It's a little unfair to simply describe Bernier as "restricted free agent backup goaltender," but to a Kings team with Jonathan Quick locked up for the next decade, that's what he was. Giving him a raise in a year when the cap is going down, well, it wouldn't have made any sense. And that brings us back to the Leafs.

Toronto, despite finishing fifth in the Eastern Conference and pushing the Bruins to seven games, was not a very good team this year. The Maple Leafs were the NHL's worst possession team, had a disturbing lack of scoring depth, boasted little in the way of defensive prowess, and generally relied too heavily on facepunching as a strategic element. The saving grace for Toronto was the goaltending of James Reimer, so why wouldn't goaltending be targeted as the position of need for the offseason?

There are two possibilities with Bernier. One is that he is acquired to be the backup, in which case it is an incredibly stupid trade to give up a competent backup, a solid role player, and a draft pick for another, more expensive backup. The other possibility is that Bernier has been acquired to take Reimer's job, in which case the Leafs have deliberately submarined the career of the goaltender who not only got them to the playoffs, but the goaltender who came up through their system and persevered through injury and constant scrutiny to emerge as one of the NHL's rising stars at his position.

Bernier is 24, and he may well turn out to be great, but this was not the deal that Toronto needed, not with other glaring holes on the roster. Giving up assets to pay Bernier a hefty salary for, at best, an incremental upgrade over what Reimer provided this season is a high-risk, low-reward move, and that is just about the worst possible kind of business that a team can do.

And, who knows, maybe the 25-year-old Scrivens winds up turning into something special after he spends some time backing up Quick. I can't help but think about that as I get ready to return to Boston, home of another goalie the Leafs traded away, Tuukka Rask. And it's worth noting that after Tim Thomas took the starting job away from Rask with the Bruins, there was a compelling case to be made for Peter Chiarelli to trade Rask. Sometimes the best trades are the ones you don't make, which the Leafs should have learned when they failed to land Miikka Kiprusoff at this year's deadline. Instead, Toronto makes a move that seems like it was made while trying to shake off the fog of airplane sleep.